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The International Lawrence Society The Herald Editors: Peter Baldwin Volume 43; April 2020 [NS-4] Steve Moore Founding Editor: Susan MacNiven

Michael Haag 1943 - 2020

In Memoriam: Michael Haag The Herald editorial ...... page 2 Peter Baldwin Michael Haag obituary...... page 3 Mark Ellingham Michael Haag and ...... page 5 Peter Baldwin Remembering Michael Haag ...... page 7 Charles Sligh with Isaac Sligh Michael Haag: The Man in Love with a City ...... page 9 Ian MacNiven Lawrence Durrell: A Life Abroad...... page 11 Michael Haag A Brief Reader’s Guide to Michael Haag’s Books ...... page 15 Peter Baldwin Notice of OMG XXI Cancellation ...... page 16

* The above photo of Michael was taken by his brother, Anton, on the island of Faial, in the Azores, in 2014. All photos in this edition of The Herald, unless otherwise attributed, are property of the estate of Michael Haag.

1 The Herald Editorial: In Memory and Celebration of Michael Haag

I think that most of our readers will have heard about the untimely death of Michael Haag last January. It took but an instant to decide, as editors, that this edition of The Herald should be put over entirely to our memories and celebrations of Michael and his work, particularly as editor, friend and would-be biographer of Lawrence Durrell. I first met Michael to speak to one to one at his home in north London in 2006. My own copy of his major work, Alexandria: City of Memory, published by Yale University Press in 2004, was rather too bulky to carry on the long-ish train journey from my home to his, so I asked him to sign a card for me to slip into my copy of the book and I include in this editorial a scan of that inscription – a great personal treasure. In this edition of The Herald, we have photos of Michael kindly provided by his family. We are most grateful to Michael’s family for their support for this edition of The Herald. Anton, Michael’s brother and executor, has kindly given permission for us to reprint Michael’s obituary of Larry; this first appeared in our academic sibling publication Deus Loci. Our thanks to Anna Lilios, editor of Deus Loci, for her permission to republish that obituary. Anna is planning to remember Michael’s work in a forthcoming edition of Deus Loci which will include Michael’s essay ‘The Mystery of Karm Abu Girg’. We have, of course, focused on Michael’s work about Lawrence Durrell in this edition of The Herald with an obituary written by Mark Ellingham, Michael’s publisher at Profile Books, with reminiscences by Ian MacNiven and Charles Sligh as well as a transcript of the short eulogy I gave at Michael’s funeral. Michael’s family assure me that, in the fullness of time, they will keep us informed about Michael’s archive, which includes his note books of material he collected for the biography of Durrell he had been commissioned to write for Yale University Press. We know this material will be of interest to Durrell scholars and students so we will keep you posted on how to access that archive which we hope will be open to serious students of Durrell’s life and works. Finally, we hope that Michael’s blog will remain online – a fascinating trove of material about Durrell and many of Michael’s other interests: http://michaelhaag.blogspot.com/ Peter Baldwin 31 March 2020

2 MICHAEL HAAG Born New York 1943, died London 2020

Mark Ellingham was Michael Haag’s publisher at Profile Books and before that at Rough Guides. Mark gave the eulogy at Michael’s funeral on 22 January 2020. Mark has written this obituary for this edition of The Herald © Mark Ellingham Michael Haag was an expert on what used to be called the Levant. He wrote books on literary Alexandria, , the Templars, Egypt and Greece. On the day of his death, he was at work on his magnum opus for Yale, a life of Lawrence Durrell, which alas will remain unfinished. Born in New York, Michael was introduced to the arcane subjects that he loved by a schoolfriend, Sterling Morrison (one of the founders of the Velvet Underground) insisting he read Robert Graves’s White Goddess. He moved to London shortly after, Michael Haag presenting during the 2012 On where he lived for the rest of his life, interspersed Miracle Ground conference in London by lengthy stays in Greece and Egypt, and travels in Photo © Peter Baldwin Syria, Turkey and Lebanon. Michael’s first books were travel guides – superbly written ones – on Greece and Egypt, which he published under the Travelaid imprint in the early-1980s. He reinvented the art of travel guides as good reads. Indeed, you could read passages of his guides and compare them with the best of Patrick Leigh Fermor. The guides led to Michael pioneering the republishing of classic travel literature. He brought back into print books by Dilys Powell, T.E. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Flaubert and (his own favourite) Libyan Sands by Ralph Bagnold – about a bunch of madcaps driving Model T-Fords around the Western Desert who later became scions of the SAS. This publishing business, however, failed due to the first Gulf War, which left Michael with a warehouse of guides to Egypt, Syria and the Lebanon – and no travellers to buy them. The benefit was that Michael turned full time to writing and over the next decade produced a book that will long survive him. This was Alexandria: City of Memory, a wonderfully rich, evocative study of the literary world of E.M. Forster, Constantine Cavafy and Lawrence Durrell, published by Yale. For the past twenty or so years, Michael managed that rare feat of supporting himself entirely from his writing – and as his editor, first at Rough Guides and then at Profile Books, I had the privilege and pleasure of working with him on a somewhat oddball succession of books. Our projects began with books that Michael could write almost from memory: a short history of Egypt and a book on Tutankhamun (to tie in with the new London exhibition), and then a guide to Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. Michael wrote the latter in a fortnight, mostly at night (his standard working practice), drawing on a lifetime of knowledge that encompassed everything from the Templars to the Holy Grail. His book was at least as interesting as Dan Brown’s novel and sold 160,000 copies.

3 Michael continued research for his Lawrence Durrell biography, while writing hugely engaging books for Profile on the Templars (a backlist staple selling more than 100,000 copies) and Mary Magdalene. But our most enjoyable project was his last, short book, The Durrells of (2017). When ITV created a series based on ’s My Family and Other Animals, it was impossible to resist asking Michael to write about what had really gone on there. He did so superbly, drawing on his old Durrell contacts (he had known Larry and Gerry, and Margo’s family), and produced another bestseller, published in multiple languages, including, to Michael’s great pleasure, Greek. Michael is survived by his children, Veronica and Philip, and stepson Anton, and by his ex-wives Jane and Loutfia. Mark Ellingham (with thanks to Neville Lewis)

Michael with his mother, Maureen, in 2003 Michael with his daughter, Veronica, in 2010

Michael at his desk in 1993, proofreading Alexandria, later published as Alexandria Illustrated

4 Michael Haag and Lawrence Durrell Peter Baldwin, one of the co-editors of The Herald, was invited to give a brief eulogy of Michael Haag at his funeral on 22 January 2020. Here is what Peter said:

My name is Peter Baldwin. I am a retired solicitor [attorney] and have been an enthusiast for the work of the novelist and poet Lawrence Durrell for over 40 years. Michael’s family have kindly allowed me to say these few words to recognise Michael’s singular and outstanding work about Larry, as he is often known. I had the pleasure of meeting with Durrell on several occasions in the late 1980’s and lost a friend when Larry died in 1990. Whilst I speak today primarily as a friend of both Michael and Larry, I also speak on behalf of the International Lawrence Durrell Society, of which I am a Board member, in expressing our sadness at Michael’s passing. Michael’s engagement and support for Larry and his work first came to my attention in Michael’s own publication in 1982 of a revised edition of E M Forster’s classic account of Alexandria: Alexandria - A History and a Guide with a specially written new introduction by Durrell. While Larry explored Alexandria in 1941 using Forster’s Guide as his own guidebook, Michael used Larry’s novel , the first of , as his own guide for his own first visit to Alexandria in 1973. In 1988, under his own imprint with that of Faber and Faber, Michael published a much expanded version of the correspondence between Durrell and Henry Miller – over 500 pages, ably edited by Durrell’s official biographer, Ian MacNiven. In 2017 came The Durrell’s of Corfu which, to quote the book’s front cover, is ‘[the] real life story of the Durrell family…..in pre-war Corfu, England and India.’ I have not forgotten the book Alexandria – City of Memory which came in 2004 and is widely seen as Michael’s masterpiece, universally acknowledged as a major source book of the biographies of Alexandrian poet Cavafy, E M Forster and Lawrence Durrell. Indeed, Yale University Press, the publishers of that book, had commissioned Michael to write a new biography of Durrell. Alas, I understand that this biography was unfinished at the time of Michael’s death so we lose both a respected enthusiast as well as scholar of Durrell but also Michael’s many insights into Durrell’s complex emotional life, snippets of which Michael would tempt me with during visits to his home in Belsize Lane. Thinking back, I have enjoyed my meetings and friendship with Michael for a number of reasons beyond this mutual enthusiasm. I appreciated his extensive knowledge of Egypt and the middle-East; I was fascinated to hear of his researches into the life of Durrell, particularly the people he had met in the course of his researches, many of whom I have met; I was intrigued and respected his insight into the complexities of Lawrence Durrell’s personality. To conclude, I would like to read one of Larry’s poems, one first published in 1945. The poem is called Mareotis, after, of course, the lake outside Alexandria and which features so much in Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet. © Peter Baldwin Note: the poem Mareotis can be found, inter alia, at p 130 of the 1980 Faber and Faber Collected Poems, 1931 – 1974, of Lawrence Durrell.

5 Michael at Billards Palace on Rue Missala, above and right Alexandria - a favorite haunt of Cavafy’s

Michael on the Pont Romain, Sommières, 1991

6 Remembering Michael Haag Charles Sligh

You gone, the mirrors all reverted, Lay banging in the empty house. . . . — Lawrence Durrell, “On Mirrors”

Although I had known about Michael’s health problems for some time, I was still caught off guard and quite gutted by hearing the news of his death. Michael has been a close friend to my family for several decades, and as time passed he became a kind of ‘uncle’ to my two boys. During those years when I taught summer courses in London, we always looked forward to walking down through Hampstead to Michael’s home in Belsize Lane for our evenings with Michael in his back garden. Michael would always be certain to give his thoughtful attention to whatever my sons Isaac and Max were interested in at the moment, and we never left without a stack of books on Byzantine History or some other fascination. I am now recalling one particular 2009 walk that we took under Michael’s guidance, where we lit Michael and the author’s son, Isaac, in 2009 out across the Heath in search of other London Photo © Charles Sligh landmarks, such as Muswell Hill and Alexandra Palace. At the young age of 14, Isaac, my oldest boy, was already one of the most learned Kinks scholars of all time, and Michael recognized and understood the young biographer’s passion for walking the home ground of Ray and Dave Davies, the brothers who founded the band. After we had a good rest at the Clissold Arms, Michael and Isaac strolled across Denmark Terrace and photographed the Davies home-place. Isaac’s photograph of 6 Denmark Terrace is still featured on the Wikipedia page for the Kinks that he constructed after we returned home. So many journalists crib their articles from Isaac that we have long lost count; now we just expect that his research and his words will be burgled. Michael laughed at that, I remember. He thought that Isaac’s work was terrific. Michael enriched those boys’ hearts and minds by offering them an encounter with a character of great warmth, kindness, learning, and devastatingly comic anecdotes. I wonder how many others were lucky enough to hear Michael holding forth with his aunt’s recollections of Orson Welles’ underpants? Also memorable was Michael’s ability to place a character. Here I am remembering Michael reflecting that so-and-so “was perfectly lovely, but a real bloody bastard.” I treasured bringing Michael and Ian MacNiven together for that little dinner so many years ago at Belsize Lane just prior to the 2012 On Miracle Ground conference in London. Those two friends have shared so much with me, early and late, and they have truly changed my life with their friendship and their learning. I planned the various events of that Centenary conference as a “thank you” to these friends, past and present — to Ian, Michael, Carol Peirce (d. 2005), Anthea Morton-Saner (Larry’s literary agent for so many years), and Bill Godshalk (d. 2015). I knew that our evening at Belsize Lane was something special when Michael told me that, up to that moment, he and Ian had never really found the time to sit down together and talk. In my grief over Michael’s passing, I find myself going back again and again to that evening and to these memorable moments.

7 I phoned Ian MacNiven the week Michael died, and Ian and I talked at some length about our memories of Michael. As we both came to realize, the whole thing must have started all those many years ago when Ian told me that “there is this incredible fellow who lives up near Hampstead — you really should phone him if you will be in London working at the BL.” I can still remember so many details from my first visit to Michael’s little flat. It might seem strange, but Michael’s back garden in Belsize Lane seemed like it would always be there, ready to welcome me and my family on any summer night. And I like to think that — somewhere, somehow — that little garden still persists, along with our friend Michael, who was always so ready and willing to share his hospitality, his wit, and his learning. Charles Sligh teaches English literature at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville, Tennessee. He was responsible for the organisation of the conference On Miracle Ground in 2012 to celebrate the centenary of Lawrence Durrell’s birth and held in London. © Charles Sligh, 2020.

Isaac adds from his apartment in Tblisi: Michael was many things to me throughout the 20 or so years that I knew him. We both lived on opposite sides of the Atlantic, which meant that our time shared together was always much too brief and often came at intervals years apart during OMG or a visit to London. Each distinct episode of our friendship left a lasting impression on me, and all of these episodes stand as perhaps my warmest memories of an individual and friend throughout my childhood and adolescence. To a restless 7 year old at an OMG banquet, Michael was my table-mate and entertainer par-excellence. He took the time to talk with me while the other adults understandably were engaged in higher things, leaning over and mischievously drawing a smiley-face puppet on my thumb and forefinger that I refused to wash off for days afterwards. To a 14 year old with a burgeoning obsession with the music of Ray Davies and The Kinks’ London, he was nothing short of a hero. Michael took my father and me on walks throughout London, always to return to his back garden, where he would hold forth (with warmth, humility, and wit I must add) with story after story of his adventures in Swinging London in the 1960s. And at all times, especially as I grew older and began to study the history of the Byzantine Empire and the middle ages, Michael was an email away whenever I wrote him. He was a lifelong friend and mentor, and one of the few, if not one of the only people I felt truly understood my passion for the subject. I still cannot believe that if I wrote to him right now, he wouldn’t write back, probably at 4 in the London morning, with a cheerful anecdote about a journey to the Middle East and his signature valediction, “pip pip.” I will miss him as I will miss very, very few friends in my life.

8 Michael Haag: The Man in Love with a City

Ian MacNiven who wrote the authorized biography of Lawrence Durrell, published by Faber and Faber in 1998, has kindly written this short account of his friendship with Michael Haag

Perhaps it was in 1981 that I met Michael: a tall man who drove up to the Faber & Faber offices in a large Volvo. I remember thinking that it was a rather odd car for a Londoner to have. He invited me and my late wife, Susan, for lunch at a club, where Michael Haag and Ian MacNiven sharing the stage at a joint we would be guests of the barrister and presentation at the ILDS On Miracle Ground conference held in London in 2012. mystery writer Sarah Caudwell. Sarah Photo © Peter Baldwin smoked a pipe, and the conversation danced around travels, books, people. She and Michael were obviously good friends, a relationship between equals without any sort of romantic tension. I was to learn that this was one of Michael’s signal traits: his gift for friendship and respect for a person’s ideas that was refreshingly gender- neutral. Soon my connection with Michael became professional, when he agreed to publish under the Faber imprint Lawrence Durrell’s exchanges with Henry Miller, which I was editing. I was back in The Bronx, where in six months I typed out what would become the 528 pages of The Durrell-Miller Letters. “I’ll fly over and we can discuss the book,” Michael announced, as casually as though he were proposing a passage from Dover to Calais. He appeared on our doorstep early in the day, we worked for an intense ten hours, and he departed with my typescript. I was staggered at how much Michael had accomplished in that session. We did the rest by mail in those pre-internet days. Later I met Loutfia, during the happier days of their relationship, and it seemed fitting that he should marry an Alexandrian. I continued to work on my Durrell biography, tracking down as many of Larry’s family and friends as I could. In 1983, Eve Durrell agreed to see me – but only if I came alone. (Susan had been my partner in nearly every other interview.) Eve was guarded, wistful, and acted as if she were the widow of Lawrence Durrell – who then was still very much alive. I had a few exchanges with her before she told me, apologetically, that she could not bear the strain of further involvement in the biography. The biography was published in 1998, and soon Michael told me that he and Eve were going to Alexandria to cover the ground of her life there with Larry. Later I met Eve and Michael in Rhodes at the 2004 On Miracle Ground conference organized by The International Lawrence Durrell Society: she was radiant, friendly, and it was easy to see in her poise and personality the woman who had so captivated Larry. I am convinced that Michael’s tact and power of persuasion had given a part of Eve’s past, of her young womanhood, back to her. In 2004 Michael published his Alexandria: City of Memory, which is really a celebration of the city, and of some of those so vitally affected by her: Cavafy, Forster, Durrell – and of Eve, of Claude Durrell, and of Michael Haag himself. The City of Memory is his monument as well!

© Ian MacNiven New York, February 2020.

9 Michael in Egypt, 1989

Michael in Egypt, 1986

Inscription in Michael’s own copy of the edition he published of Alexandria: A History and a Guide.

above and below: Michael in Greece

Michael at home in Belsize Park, Camden England in 1986

10 Lawrence Durrell: A Life Abroad Michael Haag

Michael wrote this obituary for Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Journal, Volume NS 1, 1992. It is © the estate of Michael Haag and appears by kind permission of the estate and Anna Lillios, editor of Deus Loci. Lawrence Durrell lived nearly the whole of his life on the islands and littorals of the Mediterranean. In 1935, at the age of twenty-three, he left England for Corfu, where two years later he finished his first serious novel, The Black Book, his chronicle of “the English Death” which T. S. Eliot called “the first piece of work by a new English writer to give me any hope for the future of prose fiction”: though, for fear of an obscenity prosecution, it was thirty-eight years before it could safely be published in Britain. In The Black Book, Durrell said, “I first heard the sound of my own voice,” but not until 1957, with the publication of Justine, was that voice heard by the wider public. , (both 1958), and (1960) followed, completing The Alexandria Quartet, which made Durrell world-famous. Durrell was born in India in 1912; the families of both his parents had lived there for generations. His father was a civil engineer who was contracted for engineering work on the mountain railway to Darjeeling and who later built the Tata Iron and Steel Works in Jamshedpur in the 1920s. At the Jesuit College in Darjeeling where the Himalayas filled the horizon and he could see Everest from the foot of his bed, Durrell lived “with a kind of nursery-rhyme happiness” until, against his mother’s wishes and his own, his father sent him “home’’ for a public-school education. He never took to England. At St. Edmund’s, Canterbury, he chafed against the constraint, refusing to study subjects he did not like and failing three times to pass the Cambridge entrance examination. At his father’s early death his mother settled in Bournemouth with her three younger children. Propelled out the door with: “You can be as Bohemian as you like but not in the house. I think you had better go somewhere where it doesn’t show so much,” Durrell moved to Bloomsbury with the ambition of becoming a writer. He made friends with the poets John Gawsworth and Mulk Raj Anand, and married Nancy Myers, a painter at the Slade. To supplement his small inherited income she went on the stage while he played jazz piano in a Soho night-club, a career abandoned when he leapt out of the window during a police raid. Bohemianism was beginning to pall, and the English climate, whether social, cultural, or meteorological, provoked Durrell throughout his life to a range of invectives. England was a manicured countryside of “expurgated prose-land”; its population “sneezing voluptuously in each other’s faces in a continuous cycle of reinfection.” “The energy of the English is not spiritual but social,” he wrote, swiping even at his hero D. H. Lawrence, who “stressed his parentage out of sheer annoyance that he was not born a duke.” Where England constricted the sensibilities, he said, the Eastern Mediterranean opened them out. The story of the Durrell family’s migration to Corfu is told (with some licence) in his brother Gerald’s comic masterpiece, My Family and Other Animals (1956). Reduced by the climate to “a series of illustrations from a medical encyclopedia,” they were willingly cajoled by Durrell into leaving what he called “Pudding Island.” Corfu was the closing of a circle. It could almost have been the setting of his childhood. Here Durrell said he was reborn. While Gerald was collecting scorpions and leeches, Lawrence was gathering a remarkable collection of “uncles”: Eliot, Henry Miller, George Katsimbalis, and the poet George Seferis, who later won the Nobel Prize. Durrell had written enthusiastically to Miller after reading his succés du scandale, Tropic of Cancer (l934), and soon the older man became his literary father-figure, lifetime friend, and correspondent (The Durrell-Miller Letters, 1935-80, was published in 1988). Influenced by Miller,

11 Durrell wrote The Black Book, receiving encouragement and admonitions—when he considered expurgating it for publication in England, Miller wrote: “On that grain of faith on which you built your book you must rest. You stand firm and let the world come round.” Visiting Paris in 1937, he was welcomed by Miller and Anais Nin (supreme accolade: he was permitted to peep at her diaries) who together were to oversee The Black Book’s private publication (1938); and in London he met Dylan Thomas and Eliot, who nurtured Durrell’ s lifelong association with Faber and Faber. When eventually he lured Miller to Greece in 1939, he introduced him to Katsimbalis, an outsize Athenian literary figure and raconteur, immortalized in Miller’s finest book as The Colossus of Maroussi (1941). The years 1937 and 1938 were a time of simple happiness, described in his mosaic portrait of Corfu, Prospero’s Cell (1945), the best of his island books. Years later he said, “I shall really never, never ever forget a youth spent there, discovered by accident. It was pure gold. But then of course there may be a little element of self-deception in it because youth does mean happiness, it does mean love, and that’s something you can’t get over.” It was an isolated, primitive, strangely serene life, excluding the wider reality. The epilogue, however, tells of the toll of war, of friends dead, made refugees or sent fighting on distant fronts, and the house, once “our unregretted home, a world,” bombed. “The loss of Greece has been an amputation”: by then he was already in Alexandria and Greece had been overrun by the Nazis. In April 1941, with the Germans at his heels, he escaped from Navarino with his wife and ten- month-old daughter Penelope by caïque to Crete and then to Egypt. Cairo was the clearing-house of war and Durrell found himself an exile amongst exiles. Old friends like Seferis and Xan Fielding arrived from Greece and new friends were made, among them Patrick Leigh Fermor, Lord Kinross, Reggie Smith, and, later in Alexandria, the dancer Diana Gould, who became the wife of Yehudi Menuhin. (When years later Menuhin, fifty-six, paid Durrell, then sixty, a visit in France, they performed their morning yoga exercises together: “He can play the fiddle standing on his head! I can’t write poems yet in this position but there is no reason why in the long run I shouldn’t manage to.”) With Robin Fedden, later Deputy Director-General of the National Trust (“His trouble was that he always wanted to be an English gentleman”), and Bernard Spencer, he edited Personal Landscape, one of the few literary periodicals of interest to appear during the war—its contributors including Keith Douglas, Olivia Manning, Robert Liddell, Seferis, Terence Tiller, and Gwyn Williams. While still in Greece, Durrell had wanted to join the RAF, but his knowledge of Greek and the Greeks made him more valuable in the Press Attache’s office of the British Embassy in Athens. In Cairo he became Foreign Press Secretary, a liaison with the Greek press in Egypt. Rommel’s approach drove Nancy with the child to Palestine; the marriage was already under strain and she did not return. In 1944, as head of the British information Office, he was posted to Alexandria with its large Greek population. On the verge of land and sea, with its back to Egypt and the Corniche blown by winds from occupied Greece, Alexandria was claustrophobic and painful for its reminders of his youthful idyll. What he missed most about Greece was what he called “the Eye”: ‘’Nowhere else has there ever been a landscape so aware of itself,” recording and humanising everything within it. Durrell, refusing exile, insisting on belonging (the quality which gave all his books such a powerful sense of place), became that Eye: “All indeed whom war or time threw up/ On this littoral and tides could not move/ Were objects for my study and my love.” For the majority of people “Alexandria was a dull hole… ‘There is nothing to see!’ they repeated endlessly”. But Durrell had the benefit of three guides, one the poetry of Constantine Cavafy, to which Katsimbalis and Seferis had introduced him, another E. M. Forster’s Alexandria: A History and a Guide. Stationed in Alexandria during the previous war as a Red Cross volunteer, Forster had known Cavafy. Inspired by the poet’s vision, “at a slight angle to the universe,” Forster wrote what

12 is really the exploration of an immense ghost city through which the personages of a more than two-thousand-year history pass as though players in a pageant. For Cavafy the past, whether that of ancient kings or his own demeaning love affairs, was drawn into a single Alexandrian sensibility, timeless for being rooted in memory and place. Rekindling in his Eye the long-blind Pharos, the fabled lighthouse of the Ptolemies, Durrell glimpsed “the phantom city which underlay the quotidian one,” where night-club dancers and Antonys, commerçants and Cleopatras, dissolve into one another, just as Tiresias, in Eliot’s The Waste Land—Durrell’ s third guide—melts from one character and sex into another. After leaving Egypt in 1945 for Rhodes, he wrote to Eliot about a “big book” that was germinating in his mind. For all that Egypt had stored up material for the future, leaving it was like “a cloud lifting.” Durrell was Public Information Officer for the Dodecanese, “not exactly Governor of these twelve islands, but damn near,” and by caïque he surveyed his new domain with Eve Cohen, “a strange, smashing, dark-eyed woman” of Alexandria, who became his second wife. The Greek homecoming was a happy and busy time; while writing for, editing, and supervising the publication of three daily newspapers in English, Greek, and Turkish, he also wrote a novel, Cefalu (1947, later published in America as The Dark Labyrinth), set in Crete, and began work on the second of his island books, Reflections on a Marine Venus (1953). But both he and Greece had lost their innocence; destruction, poverty, and, on the mainland, civil war, introduced a dark undertone, a note of sad reality to his book about Rhodes, reflected in the central image of the marine Venus, dredged up from the harbour where centuries of sea water had worn away her once-sharp features, so that she seemed “focused intently upon her own inner life, gravely meditating upon the works of time ... the preoccupation of a stone woman inherited from a past whose greatest hopes and ideals fell to ruins.” In 1947 the Dodecanese were united with Greece and Durrell’s job came to an end. He had hoped to go to Athens but was posted instead to Argentina as lecturer for the British Council (“Everyone with any sensibility is trying to get out of this place, including me”), and in 1949 to Belgrade, as Embassy Press Attache. “Communism,” he wrote to Miller, “is something so much more horrible than you can imagine: systematic moral and spiritual corruption by every means at hand ... And the smug cooperation of the intellectuals is also terrifying! They are paid to shut up-and they have.’’ Against a background of threatened Russian invasion and cut off from any meaningful contact with the population, life was circumscribed by the embassy rounds, the milieu for the hilarious Antrobus stories of social and diplomatic idiocies, appearing as Esprit de Corps (1957), Stiff Upper Lip (1958) and Sauve Qui Peut (1966). In 1952, aged forty, Durrell determined that it was now or never if he was to write the book that had been evolving since Egypt. With just enough money saved to buy a house in Cyprus and survive for a year, he quit the foreign service. Everything immediately went wrong. Eve had a breakdown and returned to England; the cost of maintaining her there and refurbishing his old Turkish house at Bellapaix near Kyrenia depleted his resources; and for a time he had to raise his young daughter, Sappho, while making the long dawn drive to Nicosia where he taught in a Greek school. He rose at 4:30, and by candelight, writing by hand rather than typewriter so as not to disturb his sleeping daughter, he pushed his new book along sentence by sentence. Though his wife rejoined him, the marriage soon failed. Then began the EOKA bombing campaign for Cypriot union with Greece; again Durrell took up an appointment as press officer to the British Govemor and, after being shot at in a local taverna, had to give up his home for the capital. But in the summer of 1956 he wrote to Miller: “I have just finished a book about Alexandria called Justine ... I had fallen into a bad patch of distress and apathy after Eve left for England in the middle of August with the child, which I miss, and by a stroke of luck ... a lovely young Alexandrian tumbled into my arms and gave me enough spark to settle down and demolish the book. (She is French, Claude, a writer with something oddly her own.)”

13 1957 was Durrell’s annus mirabilis in which not only Justine and Esprit de Corps were published, but also his adventure story for young people, White Eagles Over Serbia, based on his travels around Yugoslavia, and , recounting the joy turned to tragedy during his years in Cyprus. For Durrell the bitterness was acutely personal as the Greek world was once again and finally denied him. With Claude he settled in France in 1957 and remained there for the rest of his life. She was his ideal wife. He respected her intelligence, relied on her organising ability, enjoyed her humour, and was delighted that she gave as good as she got. In 1967, as he was writing the Tunc/Nunquam novels (1968 and 1970, later published together as ), she suddenly died. The darkness of those books and what some felt to be their sterility might partly have been due to this blow. A man of warmth, charm, and humour, Lawrence Durrell had a good-natured and resilient response to life. He was not a tragic novelist—and indeed revealed less of himself in his novels than in his poetry and island books—though death was a rising theme throughout his work. After Claude’s death he embarked on the most ambitious challenge of his career, writing (1974), the first in a quincunx of novels (, 1918; , 1982; Sebastian, 1983; and , 1985), together known as The Avignon Quintet. It was a difficult time, marked by concern over what the critical response to his new work would be and by his daughter Sappho’s suicide. The spiritual death which Durrell had earlier found in England he now found throughout Western civilisation, its materialism a trap, its theology a sham, superficially attractive but self-devouring, destructive, dominated by the “death drift.” No orthodoxy can serve the truly religious man, as Durrell was, and in The Avignon Quintet the quest is for the treasure of the Knights Templar, a treasure not material but their gnostic understanding that ego and will are the sources of illusion, and must be surrendered before life’s mystery can be comprehended and made whole. In an Alexandrian poem Durrell had written, “As for me I now move/ Through many negatives to what I am,” and The Alexandria Quartet was a movement through negatives, a stripping away of illusions. In The Avignon Quintet the assault on ego and its supposed reality is greater; there is a complete breakdown of character, narrative, and structure. But, after the enormous popularity of The Alexandria Quartet, his favour in the English-speaking world declined, though it remains high on the Continent. Durrell’s word-magic and copiousness and his readiness to experiment placed him outside English literary tradition, just as his life time’s “exile” detached his work from peculiarly British social concerns. But to his readers struggling to follow The Avignon Quintet he offered this epigraph to Quinx: “ ... must itself create the taste by which it is to be judged ... Wordsworth dixit.” In the last years of his life, Durrell lived in Sommiéres, near Nimes, the Vidourle slipping beneath a Roman bridge to Aigues Mortes and the Mediterranean. He would sit in his conservatory upon a stool, his bare legs drawn up beneath him in a lotus position, his own genius loci. His listeners, if not lost to his enchantment, might wonder if he had seen through illusion or had, in his crises of loneliness and loss, erected an ever more complex arrangement of sliding mirrors. It was a secret he shared with his last companion, Françoise Kestsman, a handsome woman at least as enigmatic as himself, who could smile when Durrell was asked by a young woman guest how he would prefer to die—his reply: “Of love!”

14 A Brief Reader’s Guide to Michael Haag’s Books Here we list some of the books Michael Haag wrote should readers wish to explore more. All books are by Michael unless stated otherwise. There is no particular order except I started with the smallest first then went on to the largest as that’s how they best stacked on my desk! Where possible, I have provided links to the publisher’s website. I stress that this article is just a quick guide so bibliographic details should be checked before further citation. Publishing with the American University Press in Cairo [AUC]: As I started to research this piece, I came across an obituary on the website of The American University in Cairo Press who published several of Michael’s books: https://aucpress.com/auc-press-blog/michael-haag-1943-2020/ That webpage shows a collage of the front covers of many of Michael’s books. The cover illustrations are not clickable to take you to more details about the book, so here goes with my own recommendations. The following titles are published by The American University in Cairo Press who list at the following link all titles published by them of Michael’s books: https://aucpress.com/advanced-search/?bookname=&subtitle=&author=michael+haag&isbn=&cat egory=all&language=all&format=all Here is my own choice: An Alexandria Anthology: Travel Writing Through the Centuries is a handy, pocket sized, anthology of writing about Alexandria, edited by Michael. Vintage Alexandria; Photographs of the City 1860 -1960 is a large (260mm x 260mm) book carefully edited by Michael to provide an excellent photographic portrait of the city for the 100 years from 1860. The photos are sourced from archives and were not taken by Michael. Finally in this selection from that publisher, look at Alexandria Illustrated, a pictorial guide to Alexandria with a comprehensive commentary by Michael. I understand that most, if not all, the photos in this book are by Michael himself; he was as gifted a photographer as he was a writer. It is worth stressing that the above two illustrated books are more than just picture books but well- researched and edited books by Michael so stand as reliable texts for both the traveller and the historian. Although initially published by Yale University Press, Michael’s formidable book, his magnum opus as it is rightly referred to, is also listed as an AUC Press book: Alexandria: City of Memory. The title is listed in the AUC online catalogue cited above and also in the Yale online catalogue: https://yalebooks.co.uk/display.asp?K=9780300191127 Publishing with Profile books (London, UK) Profile published several of Michael’s books (https://profilebooks.com/michael-haag.html) but one is directly related to the scope of this article – The Durrells of Corfu. Most of our readers will know of this book, written to tie into the TV series The Durrells. If your funds are limited, this book [less than £10 sterling, less for the Kindle version] is the first ‘must have’ for any reader of Michael’s books. Here is the link to the book at the Profile website: https://profilebooks.com/the-durrells-of-corfu.html

Peter Baldwin April 2020

15 15th March 2020

Dear Durrellians,

In the face of the sanitary crisis caused by Covid-19 the French government has decided to close down all French universities on Monday 16th March for an indefinite period of time. We have no other choice but to cancel our next OMG XXI “Mysticisms, Heresies and Heterotopias in the Works of Lawrence Durrell” initially due to take place in Toulouse 28-30 May 2020.

We are truly sorry for the disappointment.

People who had already registered and paid their fees have been reimbursed.

Rescheduling will take some time as our administrative and financial services are also closed. But we will keep you informed about future plans as soon as we can. Please rest assured that we are very keen to keep working with you all.

We do realize that wherever you are working and living the situation is now a very tense one. Do keep safe and let’s look ahead. I am convinced that we will manage to meet again on miracle ground.

Kind regards,

Isabelle Keller-Privat President of the International Lawrence Durrell Society

The Herald - editorial guidelines and publication dates The Herald is the newsletter of the International Lawrence Durrell Society [ILDS] – see: www.lawrencedurrell.org/. It will be emailed as a matter of course to all members of the ILDS. It will also be uploaded to www.lawrencedurrell.org/ for free access to any interested reader. Should a member wish to receive a printed version of The Herald, they may contact the editors at [email protected] to make the change. © of this Herald is held by the individual authors; © the selection in this edition held by the International Lawrence Durrell Society Readers are invited to contribute articles, news items, events and details of new publications by or about Lawrence Durrell for future publication in The Herald. Articles and contributions should, in the first instance, be limited to no more than 300 words. Unpublished photos or illustrations which may be of interest to readers of The Herald will also be welcome provided the editors are satisfied that appropriate copyright consents have been obtained. Would-be contributors are advised to email the editors ([email protected]) to discuss the scope of their contribution and its suitability for The Herald. All inquiries about The Herald should be sent to [email protected] Copy date for the next edition of The Herald [NS] is June 15, 2020 for publication by July 15, 2020. The views and opinions expressed in The Herald are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the International Lawrence Durrell Society.

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